Stefanie Braun spent over a decade as a curator at The Photographers' Gallery in London, organising exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography and editing catalogues that tried to bridge the gap between image and idea. Her co-editor — a Flemish journalist who had published short stories in literary magazines and recently completed an MA in Environmental Management — had been nursing a parallel ambition: a platform where people could connect through relevant texts and creations. The two were longtime friends. In September 2020, they launched NU, an 88-page, full-colour independent review that gives equal space and importance to every form it contains — a poem followed by a journalistic text, an artwork next to a short story.
The first issue explored the idea of habitat: how we occupy space, relate to our surroundings and each other, and whether utopias can still be imagined in a time of mass extinction, climate change, and growing inequality. Contributors responded with a multitude of voices, art forms, and genres, and the editors made a deliberate decision not to impose hierarchy. A photograph carries the same weight as an essay. A poem is not filler between features. The graphic identity, designed by Julia Syrzistie — a Glasgow School of Art graduate — translates this editorial philosophy into a visual language where the circular NU logo moves across the page like a planet in transit.
Based in Belgium and priced accessibly in both print and PDF, NU is a publication built by people who have spent decades thinking about how images and words interact on a page — and who decided, at a moment when the world was locked indoors, that the best thing to do was make something quiet, careful, and worth reading slowly.
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